The School of Information is UC Berkeley’s newest professional school. Located in the center of campus, the I School is a graduate research and education community committed to expanding access to information and to improving its usability, reliability, and credibility while preserving security and privacy.

The School of Information's courses bridge the disciplines of information and computer science, design, social sciences, management, law, and policy. We welcome interest in our graduate-level Information classes from current UC Berkeley graduate and undergraduate students and community members. More information about signing up for classes.

Research areas

Biography

I was born in the country that makes the best coffee in the world, Colombia (at least that's what I was told all my life ;) ). Born in Medellín, the "city of the neverending spring", I actually grew up in the "city with the open doors" where I studied Computer Science at the Universidad Tecnológica de Pereira (http://isc.utp.edu.co/). It was there that I developed my love for computers and my thirst for research. Wanting to learn more about research, a group of classmates and I co-founded DUTO (http://duto.co), a startup to help blind students see shapes with their hands, it took us about 10 years, but we managed to implement our system in 3 schools in Colombia. At the same time I was a lecturer at my own university for about four years. Then, and after a couple of attempts I was granted the Fulbright Science and Technology Scholarship, which allowed me to achieve my life dream of becoming a scientist by studying a Msc and Phd at the University of Maryland. There I joined the Human Computer Interaction Lab (http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/) and worked under the supervision of Catherine Plaisant and Ben Shneiderman, two of the pioneers of the Information Visualization and User Interface Design fields. After graduation, I moved to Silicon Valley for three years where I worked in Xerox Parc, where I worked on helping catch fraud and abuse in the medical system through network visualization, and Yahoo Labs, where I worked closely with Flickr to provide better interfaces for navigating photo repositories and presenting photo statistics. After this, I returned before to my home country to fulfill my commitment to Fulbright of increasing the understanding between nations through Science. Now I'm a Researcher at los Andes University (http://uniandes.edu.co/) at the Imagine research lab (https://imagine.uniandes.edu.co/) where I conduct research on Visual Analytics, Infovis and Accesibility. Starting 2017 I will also be joining the online program at Berkeley to help teaching the Data Visualization Course.